


Century Colors

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M, all of those things that come with the winter soldier backstory, not all of which is consensual, warnings for medical experimentation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 13:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1512434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky watches out for Steve. It's what he does, what he's always done. It doesn't matter if he loves it or hates it, if he gives a damn about Captain America or not, but he has to have Steve's back. </p><p>Even when he loses his arm to a cannon in a train in the Alps, he'll take any chance the Army offers if it means he can keep going out alongside Steve. Even if it means volunteering for a new kind of Project Rebirth, or something about a new artificial arm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The unrelenting rattling of the train along the tracks feels like everything does these days—fast, too fast, speeding along out of control, gone too far to take back. Bucky’s heart is racing, he still feels the freezing fingers of the wind raking through his hair as he was climbing along the roof of the train, his own hands are like ice and his face feels numb and now he’s trying to use Steve’s pistol to take out some huge guy with a cannon at the other end of the train car. But Steve is just behind Bucky, just behind the door that separates him from Bucky, and this is all for the mission that Steve planned. And that’s why, when Steve bursts through the door, Bucky knows he has to stand up and aim true.

Steve opens the door, rushes through with only his shield now as both weapon and protection, and Bucky’s shooting but it’s not doing any damn good against the huge guy’s armor. Then there’s a blue flash of light and Steve’s on the floor and the shield’s flying and clattering to the wall by Bucky’s feet.

The huge bastard in the armor turns to Bucky and the cannon in his hands starts its whine, the sound that says it’s powering up for another shot. And Steve’s down. So Bucky steps forward.

The shield is just by Bucky’s right foot. If it had fallen on his left, Bucky could pick up the shield and still shoot with his right hand. But it’s not on his left; it’s fallen on his right, so Bucky uses his last two shots with the shield touching his boot on the floor and when the train shudders, just a little, Bucky reaches to grab the shield—

The car shakes. Bucky reaches. Somewhere to Bucky’s side, Steve is moving but not fast enough. The cannon finishes its whine, and then—

A roar, and the feeling of a void behind him, the return of the wind with its frozen touch on his face, in his hair, on the nape of his neck, inches away. Bucky’s knees hit the floor of the train and he falls forward, but he’s just able to hold himself up enough to see Steve throw himself bodily at the man who had the gun. Bucky can’t quite see Steve’s face, but it doesn’t really look like Steve’s face, and then with one fast sweeping twist of his body Steve hurls the armored man out of the hole in the side of the train.

Steve drops down next to Bucky, pushing him onto his back and putting bare hands, warm hands on his face. “Bucky, Bucky,” Steve says, whispers.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, reaching with his hand toward the pain in his arm, the pain-that-isn’t, that is and isn’t, and he thinks he might be wounded.

“Hang on,” Steve says, like it’s an order, and Bucky tries not to close his eyes but suddenly everything is welling up all over him, all his nerves and—

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve says again, and he’s saying something else but Bucky doesn’t hear.

***

There are a lot of times after that of being partly awake and partly asleep, of nurses and doctors behind masks moving him with clinical hands and telling Sergeant Barnes to relax, take a deep breath, don’t move, and on the count of three—

One of those times, Bucky looks down and sees the arm that isn’t there, the left arm that ends above the elbow in a clump of white cloth, and the nurse talks to him but his thoughts are tangled and he lies back down as she’s told him. _It’s over_ , he thinks. At first it feels like salvation. It’s over. But then it feels like betrayal, because Steve will still be going out with the Commandos. Without him. Steve will be out there without Bucky’s eye on him through the scope. Steve asked Bucky to come with him, he took Bucky out of the Hydra camp and the ranks of ordinary men and invited him into that strange country where Steve is a hero, and now Bucky has fallen behind and he will never catch up again.

The next time Bucky really wakes up, Steve is there in his Captain America uniform.

Bucky feels sunk down in his pillows, so he tries to sit up a little like he’s in control of what’s going on, and he clears his throat a little so he can sound normal when he says, “We get him?”

“Zola?” Steve says. Steve’s face looks worn and beat-up in a way that tells Bucky there’s been a lot of tears on it. “Yeah, we got him.” Steve does that sweet half-smile that’s the closest the guy can ever get to a lie. “We’re about to go out again in about an hour. Got some intel from Zola we have to move on.”

“Yeah?” Bucky says. No chance of going with, it’s obvious; can’t fire a rifle with one hand. “Well, you’ll have to watch your back, since I’m not there to do it for you. Don’t get sloppy.”

"Okay," Steve says. He nods once and then puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, the right one. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back,” he says, making it sound like a promise.

So Steve goes. And Carter and Stark and Phillips are gone too; almost everyone’s gone on this mission, Bucky soon realizes. Apparently Steve didn’t really convey the idea that this was _the_ mission, the final one, the one to take down Schmidt. The doctors and nurses that are left are nice, but they don’t know much of anything about the SSR. Bucky asks them for updates, but they don’t know.

Bucky’s left to lie in his bed in the long row of other beds in the ward, listen to the cries and mumbles of the other poor guys there and look at the cream-painted ceiling and what looks like old Victorian molding that’s cracked and been painted over too many times. Maybe it’s just his head, but he thinks he can feel his body getting weaker, losing any of the strength he gained in Basic and in those years with the Commandos.

At just about the time that Bucky figures Steve must be starting his attack, he gets some visitors. It’s a bunch of bigwigs, more than he thought _he_ warranted, but the guys visiting him are obviously important enough that Bucky gets moved into a private room just so that they can talk to him. No nurses, just Bucky in his pajamas (with one empty arm) in the room and three different guys in really nice uniforms with their arms folded. By their uniforms, two of them are colonels and one is a general. He’s never seen any of them before, doesn’t know their names.

Bucky thinks one of the nurses gave him a pitying look before she left, and the phrase _court-martial_ starts coming into his mind, except he doesn’t even know what he might have done other than what all of the other guys did. He shot a lot of people in the last few years. That’s all, maybe that’s enough, he doesn’t know.

“Sergeant Barnes,” says the general, “the conversation we’re about to have is one hundred percent confidential. I know you understand what that means.”

“Yes, sir,” Bucky says. He knows that this is the first thing to say to this kind of a man.

The general sits down in a chair by Bucky’s bedside. “”You’ve done a great service to your country, Sergeant,” the general says. This man is no Colonel Phillips, Bucky realizes. Although the intonation of this guy’s words sounds like every other Army blowhard he’s had to listen to, what’s on his face doesn’t match up. Even Phillips had some kind of sense of humor; this guy looks like someone who’d sign his name to kill you in a second and never blink. Bucky wonders just how much of the war this man has seen.

He looks like Zola, Bucky realizes; not in terms of size but in the way he looks at other people. Zola—Zola looked at Bucky like he was an experiment, not a person. This man is the same.

“You’ve proven yourself to be highly effective in Captain Rogers’ unit,” says the general. “We value your work. We’d like for you to continue your service.”

Bucky tries to translate _continue your service_. “Sir,” he starts.

“This is the twentieth century,” the general says, and for the first time some hint of an expression appears in his eyes. “We may have lost Erkine’s serum, but another formula is in development. There have been advances in the fields of prosthetics.” He folds his hands on his knees. “If there were another Project Rebirth, Sergeant Barnes, would you volunteer?”

Bucky thinks of the table that he’s tried never to think of for a long time, the table where Zola looked down at him and didn’t listen to his name or rank or number. In a dark room with a harsh smell. _Did it hurt?_ It hurt a lot for him, before. For a long time, it hurt and he’s never told anyone that.

He wonders what they will do with Steve after the war. If Steve comes back from this mission—and if he doesn’t, nothing matters either way—but if Steve comes back from this mission, he’ll still be Captain America. They’ll always call on him, and Steve will always answer when he’s called, won’t he? And Bucky said, he said he’d follow Steve.

So, one way or the other, there’s no way out. Is there? There’s no way out. And Bucky doesn’t know if that’s hope or consolation or despair. Maybe it’s just a fact of life, that he goes where Steve goes. He’s always looked out for Steve. He has to.

“Sir, if I could stay in Captain Rogers’ unit,” Bucky says, “I’d volunteer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, writing longer fics is so hard for me, but I'm aiming to make this one at least 5k words or so and take it through a good chunk of history. 
> 
> Also totally inspired by the actor's interview where Sebastian Stan says that Bucky tells himself every mission is the last mission, but Steve's going so Bucky has no choice, he has to go too.
> 
> Please leave comments! Tell me your thoughts!


	2. Chapter 2

It's Carter who thinks to make the phone call. He gets it very early in the morning, and the nurses put him in a wheelchair and take him over to the desk where there’s the phone.

“Sergeant,” Carter says, softly, with her British accent.

“Where’s Steve?” Bucky says.

Carter explains, still speaking so gently and exactly, that Steve was in a plane taking out Schmidt, and Steve won, but—but the plane went down somewhere near Iceland. Steve was able to give his coordinates to Stark, though, before he went down, and Stark’s out there right now in his own plane looking for Steve.

“I thought you should know before the papers,” Carter says.

“There’s still a chance—a good chance,” Carter says. “Captain Rogers would be able to endure the cold much longer than an ordinary man."

It’s only when she’s done speaking that Bucky realizes she must be trying to convince herself as much as she’s trying to convince him. Bucky knows that it’s due to her help Steve was able to save him the first time. He remembers that Steve loves her; Steve probably even went to her when Bucky got taken out in the Alps.

All things considered, maybe she's even almost good enough to deserve Steve. Maybe she really does see what it is that makes Steve so good. That’s what he wanted for Steve, isn’t it?

“You know, you’d be surprised,” he says over the phone. “Steve pulled through a lot of stuff I never expected him to. He’s tough, you know? He’s really tough.”

“Yes, he is,” Carter says. In her voice, there’s love.

Carter promises to keep Bucky updated, and then she’s gone.

***

It doesn’t hit the papers until the next morning. Bucky doesn’t read them; he’s more than tired with Captain America crap that doesn’t have more than a grain of truth in it. He’s seen all the dumb cartoon posters around with distorted images of foreign bad guys, and of course that’s all horseshit. It’s much worse because all the guys they’re facing _aren’t_ some cackling cartoon bad guy (well, except for the Red Skull. Who the fuck even knows about him). But all the other guys they’re fighting, they’re real guys. Real guys running the camps Bucky’s seen, in the factories, real guys who tied him down. Real guys with kind faces doing the kind of things they don’t put on posters.

He rolls over in bed and imagines Stark circling in a plane, looking for the red and blue of Steve on a sheet of ice. Bucky ought to have been there; this is the kind of thinking men always fall into on the front lines, but Bucky knows it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been where he ought to be. He can’t bear to think of Steve alone in a plane somewhere.

The next phone call comes around dinnertime. Again, they put a blanket over Bucky’s knees like he’s some kind of invalid (he doesn’t use his arm to walk, he keeps telling them) and wheel him over to the phone, where all the nurses are avidly listening. Some of them are even pretty; sometime before the war, he would’ve used the chance to talk to them.

Bucky just takes the receiver and says, “Barnes.”

“Hiya, Bucky,” Steve says, a little hoarse and worse for wear but—he sounds happy.

“You dumb asshole,” Bucky says, scandalizing the nurses even as has to lean his hand against the side of his face because his vision’s blurring. “What did you do to yourself?”

“I’m fine,” Steve says blithely. “Got a little cold but I’m okay now. I oughta be back in London in a few days, but I think they want me to give interviews to newspapers or something.” Bucky can just tell Steve’s making the mom-I-don’t-want-to-take-a-bath face he always makes when people want to shower him with adulation. 

“Hey, they might write you a new song,” Bucky teases, fake-bright, and Steve laughs and says, “You jerk.”

***

Bucky doesn’t exactly tell Steve everything about Project Tuesday (the name for the new Project Rebirth, Bucky does not know why it’s called that and doesn’t ask, but he knows by now that the military tends to give their most boring codenames to their most interesting and scandalous operations).

When Steve does arrive back in London, looking as healthy as can be and not at all like he spent two days sitting on an iceberg like he apparently did, he’s on top of the world. Bucky gleans that some progress has happened on the Agent Carter front, both because Steve kind of says as much and also because he’s beaming like a little kid, just shining out with happiness like the sun walking around in a khaki uniform. The only time when he’s not smiling is when he looks at Bucky, even though Bucky tries to draw as little attention to his arm as possible.

Would it be worth it, Buck thinks, looking at Steve through the rainy light of the window pane, London's grayness not at all touching the goodness of his face, the sincerity of his eyes. Would it be worth it to lose Steve, to save New York City and all those other cities? He knows the answer ought to be yes, but it doesn't feel that way. Steve thinks it's a lark that he just cheated death again, but it's not.

Anyway, Steve even brings the other Commandos to Bucky’s new private room and they all visit in turn, bearing gifts as appropriate. It’s like visiting Bucky is a holiday. Carter herself visits, too; she tells Bucky that it’s traditional in Britain to bring grapes to people in hospital, but she hasn’t any so she brings him a strange kind of Hydra-modified Luger, even though Bucky’s pretty sure he’s not actually allowed guns in the hospital. But it’s the best present of all.

But apparently what’s on Steve’s mind, other than Agent Carter, is the upcoming Operation Grapeshot, a.k.a. the planned offensive into Italy. Although there are a few old Hydra outposts that need to be checked over to ensure that Hydra’s well and truly eradicated, they’re apparently no great threat, and Steve really wants to be where he thinks he’ll be of most use (in other words, the most dangerous place, of course). Phillips, though, wants him to do the clean-up on Hydra personally, and then there’s Senator Brandt and others who just want him to do another press and propaganda tour, seeing as he’s proven himself once again a legendary hero.

 “Look, you wouldn’t want some new Schmidt to pop up in Switzerland five years from now,” Bucky advises from his bed. “Make sure they’re all gone, right?”

“Wish you were coming, Buck,” Steve says. It’s the first time they’ve even mentioned Bucky’s injuries.

“Yeah, well,” Bucky says, picking at his blanket until he forces himself to stop. “No camping out on an iceberg this time. Just get it done, come see me back in Brooklyn, we’ll put on our uniforms and—and you can bring Agent Carter, too, show her the old home town.”

Steve blinks. “They sending you back?”

“Yeah, can’t say in London forever—no need, anyways,” Bucky says. He shrugs on his right side. “I said I’d help ‘em test out a new, you know. Arm. That’s all in New York.”

“That’s great,” Steve says. He really means it, too.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He thinks of the Scotch that Dum Dum brought, that’s stashed under his bed with Peggy’s Luger. "Good luck," he says.

Thing is, Bucky doesn’t really know what Project Tuesday will involve. They said he has to heal up more before they can start with the arm, so he’s doing that first. Until then, there’s nothing he can do.

So Steve leaves: Phillips got his way, the Commandos are cleaning up the last scraps of Hydra scattered over Europe while the Allied forces finish their big push west into Germany and put Italy on their maps. The visiting-Bucky holiday ends, and the whole crew heads out across the Channel again, and Bucky finds himself packing up his kit for the trip back to New York.

It’s only once he’s got his bag on his bed and his old uniform on, with the sleeve folded up and pinned on his left side, that he looks out the window at the rainy street and realizes: for him, the war is over. At least for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love to read comments, please tell me what you think!
> 
> I am very unclear on the timeline of events in the movie, but I decided that Steve's plane feat comes after D-Day, so I put us in the spring of 1945.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter needs a serious content/trigger warning for just about everything associated with Winter Soldier. Medical experimentation (not wholly consensual), trauma, memories of (medical) torture, body modification, all that stuff. If you think it's not best for you to read that, you can skip to the next chapter when Bucky is all done getting the arm and the new fake serum.

For some reason, when Bucky sets foot on American soil again, everything is different.

Maybe it’s because he’s never lived in a USA that didn’t have a Steve Rogers in Brooklyn. Maybe it’s the time that’s passed, the realization that while he was overseas, time passed here too. But maybe it’s the feeling that the James Buchanan Barnes who shipped out years ago isn’t the one who’s come back.

Thank God he doesn’t have to go back to Brooklyn until the actual procedure, when they stick their new version of the serum in him (and he ought to tell them that perhaps Zola already tried that too, but he isn’t sure what good it did him, if any). But either way, it’s clear that the shape that the old Bucky occupied in the world isn’t the one that he takes up now. Even apart from being short an arm.

He’s a veteran now, a returning soldier, just like those Great War soldiers he saw when he was little. It was different in London because it wasn’t home, it didn’t really feel real. Now he’s back in the USA, in D.C. (for all he sees it out of the hospital windows), it’s home, and he wonders if it recognizes him. Like a cousin or an old schoolfriend, he recalls the Bucky who worked at the Navy Yard, the Bucky Barnes who took two girls dancing on his last night in Brooklyn. He closes his eyes and tries to remember the feeling of that night, of sailing buoyant on the swell of being twenty-six and good-looking in a uniform, of tipping his hat to the side on his head and dancing in the dark with a girl with a skirt that swished against his knee when she moved and a little perfume clinging to her.

He’d been worried about Steve then. He hadn’t wanted to leave him. But there had been the comfort of knowing for sure that no matter what happened to Bucky, and no matter how mad it made Steve, Steve was never gonna get past that 4F.

For what feels like years and is really just weeks, all of Bucky’s life is this parade of thoughts within his two ears, while what’s left of his body sits in a bed and makes small talk with other guys on the ward and watches spring come up slowly outside. Bucky follows what news he can in the paper, but he doesn’t trust their reports much any more.

There are two letters from Steve, each with almost nothing in them. It’s all confidential, the Commandos business.

This is how time passes until, at last, Bucky’s as healed up as they want him to be. Different sets of doctors take Bucky into separate rooms and look at his arm, test his heartbeat and pulse and take his blood as he grits his teeth, until finally they decide: he’s ready.

Steve’s told Bucky a little, only little tidbits, about what it was like for him in Project Rebirth. From what it sounded like, though, Erkine was a good guy. Well, whoever the Erskine is this time, he hasn’t said anything to Bucky. Bucky just gets ferried up to New York and into Brooklyn, and what do you know, there’s no sympathetic lady agent with him either. Just a fake store selling antique paintings, and then past that a secret entrance that goes downstairs.

Up on the street, for the second Bucky got to walk it, it was warm. Underground, though, spring isn’t there, and it’s chilly. They lead Bucky into a big room with what looks like a big metal coffin at the center, and there standing next to it is—

it's—

Zola.

“Take off your shirt,” says a doctor Bucky doesn’t know.

Zola is fiddling with dials and levers on a scientific-looking panel. And then Zola turns a little to look at Bucky and smiles.

Icy fingers in his hair. A sudden void behind him, snow on the nape of his neck, a chasm at his back, a blue cannon flaring. Bucky’s knees might buckle. The cold, sweat, cold of the lab, of being crammed with the other guys in the factory and then the lab, Zola’s little round face and harmless eyes and his questions. The straps on his arms, the—the—

The doctor Bucky doesn’t know has grabbed his elbow to hold him straight.

“Don’t worry, Sergeant Barnes,” Zola says, in the tone of voice people use to speak to children. “I’m on your side now. Here to do good.”

“Take your shirt off,” says the doctor.

Bucky starts to unbutton his shirt, something he’s gotten better at with just one hand. Around him he sees an underground room, a secret vault that nobody knows about, that even Steve doesn’t know about, and there are soldiers with guns at the door. Howard Stark is noticeably not present. Perhaps he’s just seeing it for the first time with clear eyes. Because he’s not sure, he’s not sure exactly what would happen if he said now that he’d changed his mind.

But has he changed his mind? The point of it, anyway, was he could keep on going out after Steve. Keep looking after Steve.

Steve will always be Captain America.

And what else would Bucky do? Beg for a job and sort mail for Stark? The Navy Yard won’t take him any more. What he does is shoot a rifle and watch out for Steve, and there’s only one way to keep doing that.

Bucky slides the knot of his tie loose and pulls it over his head. Since the arm, he’s tried to keep his tie knotted and just tighten it or loosen it as needed; easier that way. He takes the shirt off.

Zola is looking at the place where his bare left arm stops.

They take his tie and his shirt and tell Bucky to lie down on the table, so he lies down. They don’t care if he closes his eyes, anyway.

***

It hurts. Bucky tried to blot out as much as he could from before, so he can’t compare if it’s more or less. It doesn’t matter anyway, because it goes on for a long time and reason and logic goes out the window fast. Here’s the secret Bucky knows from all those times Steve had fevers, from the factory, from the hospital: all humans are prisoners to their bodies, and it’s fast, very very fast, that a thinking man with a name and a history turns into nothing more than feelings and flesh.

They start on the arm right after the serum, and that isn't just one step and it’s not the same as in the hospitals in London or D.C. No cute nurses who chatter or give him thoughtful looks. Here it's always chilly, always a little damp, he's always either coming out of a morphine haze or going back under—could be five times or a hundred, it all blurs together. There are no windows, just the electric bulb in the ceiling that's either on or off, if Bucky's awake or asleep or drifting, drifting and trying to keep hold of the part of himself that's not his body, that's not in pain. Bucky tells himself he just has to make it through and let the time pass, but partway through he starts to think that he was wrong. Once already he’s been in this place and then gone back aboveground, to Steve’s country. It was hard then. But now he’s come back, and he’ll have to return again. 

The general and the colonels that Bucky saw before rarely come; they still don’t tell him their names. Zola is the one who checks on him every day, who looks at the test results and then asks him—questions. Bucky answers the questions but never says a word more to the man. All of the worst moments in his life belong to this little parasite man, like the same fate that tied Bucky to the rightness of Steve has tied him to the rottenness of Zola too. Bucky says nothing to him but as far as Bucky’s concerned, Zola ought to be dead and Bucky would like him dead, and Zola’s baby-smile each time he comes says Zola knows that very well.

But, all the same, Bucky’s slowly gaining the benefits of what he’s been given. At first the arm latches on to his body, biting with teeth into his shoulder. He thought it would just extend the part that’s missing, but it’s more than that. At the start it’s the parts on his shoulder, like armor, and then something deep in the insides of his arm, and only then does the rest of the arm grow.

But one morning, Bucky wakes in the underground room with no windows and he has a left arm again. It’s steel or some other metal, it aches like hell and it’s clumsy but there’s an arm and a hand and fingers. It could use a rifle.

One of the doctors gives him exercises to do with it. With the improved learning that he should have from the serum, and the improved healing, it could be weeks until the arm feels nearly natural. That’s what they say.

Bucky asks for a newspaper; he hasn’t had one in a long time, but he can think straight a little more now that the pain is less and the morphine is less too (although that never helped so much after the serum anyway).

It takes them a day or so to get him one, but when they do the headline says—

It says that the USA has dropped atomic bombs on Japan. By order of President Truman, not Roosevelt.

So Japan has surrendered. The war’s over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a comment and let me know what you think! I feel like this is new ground for me in fanfic because my stories are usually about angsty cuddles or adoring cuddles, so . . . . yeah.
> 
> I also want to make it clear that Bucky's feelings about his arm are not my views on disability; he has issues with it that he's gonna have to work through.


End file.
